The U.S. government’s road safety agency is again investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust.
In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”
Every time I hear something about pedestrian being killed by something self-driving, it begins to irk me as to why are we pushing for such and such technology.
Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.
This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they’re not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.
Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn’t. We tolerate crashes because we can’t improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it’s irrational not to do it.
This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.
His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.
His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.
This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.
If the camera system + software results in being 1% safer than a human, and a given human can’t afford the lidar version, society is still better off with the human using the camera-based FSD than driving manually. Elon being a piece of shit doesn’t detract from this fact.
But, yes, a lot of “ifs” in there, and obviously he did this to cut costs or supply chain or blahblah
Lidar or other tech will be more relevant once we’ve raised the floor (everyone getting the additional safety over manual driving) and other FSDs become more mainstream (competition)
Also, on a final note…
Why the fuck would you limit yourself to only human senses when you have the capability to add more of any sense you want??
If you have the option to add something that humans don’t have, why wouldn’t you? As an example, humans don’t have gps either, but it’s very useful to have in a car
Unfortunately the answer to that is: Elon’s cheap and Radar is expensive. Not so expensive that you can’t get it in a base model Civic though, which just makes it that much more absurd.
Because a global pandemic broke your sensor supply chain and you still want to sell cars with FSD anyway, so cameras-only it is!
Humans move with only feet so cars should be limited to using feet. And only 2 of them.
Well building battlemechs does seem like the obvious next step on Elon’s progression
You mean promising to build battlemechs, and fucking around for 5 years while grifting his stock valuation sky-high, then coming forward with a cheap robot that can’t even walk?
Regarding point number 2, I have no doubt we’ll be able to develop systems that process visual/video data as well as or better than people. I just know we aren’t there yet, and Tesla certainly isn’t.
I like to come at the argument from the other direction though; humans drive with eyesight because that’s all we have. If I could be equipped with sonar or radar or lidar, of fucking course I’d use it, wouldn’t you?
Really fucking stupid that we as a society intentionally choose to fuck around and find out rather than find out before we fuck around.
I purchased FSD when it was 8k. What a crock of shit. When I sold the car, that was this only gave the car value after 110k miles and it was only $1500 at most.
In five years guys!!
Fuck Elon musk.
But self-driving is one of the most needed technologies to aim for in the near future. And it’s a shame that as American space industry it has , apparently, let be in the hands of a lunatic.
The potential to reduce road mortality. And to give back to humans thousands of hours back of their time (you can do other things while not driving).
I don’t really care about the philosophical question on who is to blame if a self driving car run over one person if road mortality got statistically reduced by a big value thanks to the technology.
The anti technology I see on some supposedly progressive people nowadays really scares me. Bad omen. It’s like having a choice between rich conservatives and poor conservatives, but only conservatives nonetheless.
That’s just a train/bus with extra steps and far more risk. Cities with cars as the main mode of transport are still ugly places to live.
I live in what is supposedly taught as the better mobility solution. A dense european city.
It’s true, I can go everywhere walking and by public transport… and it sucks.
Such density to allow for good public transport means living in apartments like ants, instead of houses.
I like walking but in winter or summer it can be miserable. Buses you get really tired of very quickly, crowded, crazy people, smells, having to be on foot because no seats, dizziness, and in big cities pickpocketing. It’s a lot of misery IMHO.
I’ve live like this many decades and I cannot see the time I can move out of the city, well knowing I’ll need a car for everything because lower densities does not allow for walking/good public transport. But I find higher densities just miserable to live in.
As such I would love to have self driving cars. Seems such a life quality improvement.
oh so you’re just an unhappy person
I’m unhappy of sharing this world with people with such low empathy, yes.
Be easier to automate various types of rail.
As stated in other comment of mine. Public transport/walkikg is good for high density cities.
Not everyone would be happy living in such environment. I fact I think most people won’t. Low density environment have a need for cars. And I think if cars are needed, they’d better be electric and self driving.
Then it’s a difference of opinion, I think they would be happier with better public transport.
It could be measured I suppose.
Giving completely free will without economic pressure most people would chose one environment or the other.
I suppose there’s enough statistical data on the world to make such analysis. Not that I’m going to do it. But I think it could be measurable what people chose when money is not a factor, as in I need to live X because I don’t have money to live in Y.
Anyway it’s almost a fact that there would be people that would love to live in one place and some people on the other. So best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.
I think a lack of availability is what is stopping the free market from choosing the better form of transportation.
best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.
You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)
Why is it the most needed though?
I’m not really sold on the importance of it anymore tbh. It was a cool scifi dream but driving is not even at the top 1000 issues we need solving right now.
Full Self Driving shipping
202520262027309844841e+156^ You are hereTesla: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual cameras.
TeslaMusk: Why would we need lidar? Just use visual camerasFTFY
The worst way to die would be getting hit by a shitbox Tesla. RIP.
I mean I’ll take it over being burned alive or brutally eaten alive by a pack of ravenous wolves.
I’ll take the wolves
Neither of those are necessarily quicker or less painful than getting hit by the car.
For some real fun, try for all three at once!
Tesla, which has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.
how is it legal to label this “full self driving” ?
If customers can’t assume that boneless wings don’t have bones in them, then they shouldn’t assume that Full Self Driving can self-drive the car.
The courts made it clear that words don’t matter, and that the company can’t be liable for you assuming that words have meaning.
Right? It’s crazy that this is legal.
It drives your full self, it doesn’t break you into components and ship those seperately.
That’s pretty clearly just a disclaimer meant to shield them from legal repercussions. They know people aren’t going to do that.
Last time I checked that disclaimer was there because officially Teslas are SAE level 2, which let’s them evade regulations that higher SAE levels have, and in practice Tesla FSD beta is SAE level 4.
It is a legal label, if it was safe it would be “safe full self driving”.
legal or not it’s absolutely bonkers. Safety should be the legal assumption for marketing terms like this, not an optional extra.
Literally its “partial self driving” or “drive assist”
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now definitely on Musk’s list of departments to cut if Trump makes him a high-ranking swamp monster
Alongside the EPA for constantly getting in the way of the FAA trying to slip his SpaceX flight licenses through with a wink and a nudge instead of properly following regulations, and the FAA for trying to keep a semblance of legality through the whole process.
Why do you think musk dumping so much cash to boost Trump? The plan all along is to get kickbacks like stopping investigation, lawsuits, and regulations against him. Plus subsidies.
Rich assholes don’t spend money without expectation of ROI
He knows Democrats will crack down on shady practices so Trump is his best bet.
He’s not hoping for a kickback, he is offered a position as secretary of cost-cutting.
He will be able to directly shut down everything he doesn’t like under the pretense of saving money.
Trump is literally campaigning on the fact that government positions are up for sale under his admin.
“I’m going to have Elon Musk — he is dying to do this… We’ll have a new position: secretary of cost-cutting, OK? Elon wants to do that,” the former president said"
Eyes can’t see in low visibility.
musk “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes. we dont need LiDAR”
FSD kills someone because of low visibility just like with eyes
musk reaction -
The cars used to have RADAR. But they got rid of that and even disabled it on older models when updating because they “only need cameras.”
Cameras and RADAR would have been good enough for most all conditions…
He really is a fucking idiot. But so few people can actually call him out… So he just never gets put in his place.
Imagine your life with unlimited redos. That’s how he lives.
It’s worse than that, though. Our eyes are significantly better than cameras (with some exceptions at the high end) at adapting to varied lighting conditions than cameras are. Especially rapid changes.
Hard to credit without a source, modern cameras have way more dynamic range than the human eye.
Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.
Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.
They’re also pretty noisy in low light and generally take long exposures (a problem with a camera at high speeds) to get sufficient input to see anything in the dark. Especially if you aren’t spending thousands of dollars with massive sensors per camera.
if he was truthful: “the cost of adding lidar cuts in my profits”
Correction - Older Teslas had lidar, Musk demanded they be removed because they cut into his profits. Not a huge difference but it does show how much of a shitbag he is.
Honestly though, I’m a fucking idiot and even I can tell that Lidar might be needed for proper, safe FSD
The whole “we drive with our eyes” thing is such bullshit. Humans are terrible drivers. Autonomous driving should be better than humans.
That goes for OpenPilot too. They actually openly advertise that their software makes the same mistakes as humans, as if it’s some sort of advancement. Like if I could plug Lidar into my brain, I totally would.
You’d think “we drive with our eyes, cameras are eyes.” is an argument against only using cameras but that do I know.
How Can Cameras Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real?
What pisses me off about this is that, in conditions of low visibility, the pedestrian can’t even hear the damned thing coming.
I hear electric cars all the time, they are not much quieter than an ice car. We don’t need to strap lawn mowers to our cars in the name of safety.
You can hear them, but manufacturers had to add external speakers to electric cars to make them louder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sounds
I think they are a lot more quiet. I’ve turned around and seen a car 5 meter away from me, and been surprised. That never happens with fuel cars.
I think if you are young, maybe there isn’t a big difference since you have perfect hearing. But middle aged people lose quite a bit of that unfortunately.
I’m relatively young and it can still be difficult to hear them especially the ones without a fake engine sound. Add some city noise and they can be completely inaudible.
‘city noise’ you mean ICE car noise. We should be trying to reduce noise pollution not compete with it.
It’s not safe for cars to be totally silent when moving imo since I’d imagine it’s more likely to get run over.
Humans know to drive more carefully in low visibility, and/or to take actions to improve visibility. Muskboxes don’t.
They also decided to only use cameras and visual clues for driving instead of using radar, heat cameras or something like that as well.
It’s designed to be launched asap, not to be safe
I mean, that’s just good economics. I’m willing to bet someone at Tesla has done the calcs on how many people they can kill before it becomes unprofitable
Muskboxes
like that
I’m not so sure. Whenever there’s crappy weather conditions, I see a ton of accidents because so many people just assume they can drive at the posted speed limit safely. In fact, I tend to avoid the highway altogether for the first week or two of snow in my area because so many people get into accidents (the rest of the winter is generally fine).
So this is likely closer to what a human would do than not.
The question is, is Tesla FSD’s record better, worse, or about the same on average as a human driver under the same conditions? If it’s worse than the average human, it needs to be taken off the road. There are some accident statistics available, but you have to practically use a decoder ring to make sure you’re comparing like to like even when whoever’s providing the numbers has no incentive to fudge them. And I trust Tesla about as far as I could throw a Model 3.
On the other hand, the average human driver sucks too.
Yeah, I honestly don’t know. My point is merely that we should have the same standards for FSD vs human driving, at least initially, because they have a lot more potential for improvement than human drivers. If we set the bar too high, we’ll just delay safer transportation.
low visibility, including sun glare, fog and airborne dust
I also see a ton of accidents when the sun is in the sky or if it is dusty out. \s
Yup, especially at daylight savings time when the sun changes position in the sky abruptly.
Cameras are probably worse here, but they may be able to make up for it with parallel processing the poor data they get.
The median driver sure, but the bottom couple percent never miss their exit and tend to do boneheaded shit like swerving into the next lane when there’s a stopped car at a crosswalk. >40,000 US fatalities in 2023. There are probably half a dozen fatalities in the US on any given day by the time the clock strikes 12:01AM on the west coast.
Edit: some more food for thought as I’ve been pondering:
FSD may or may not be better than the median driver (maybe this investigation will add to knowledge), but it’s likely better than the worst drivers… But the worst drivers are the most likely to vastly overestimate their competence, which might lead to them actively avoiding the use of any such aids, despite those drivers being the ones who would see the greatest benefit from using them. We might be forever stuck with boneheaded drivers doing boneheaded shit
Humans know to drive more carefully in low visibility…Muskboxes don’t.
They do, actually. It even displays a message on the screen about low visibility.
To be fair its marketed as full self driving, not full self no crashing
It sure crashed its full self
If anyone was somehow still thinking RoboTaxi is ever going to be a thing. Then no, it’s not, because of reasons like this.
It doesn’t have to not hit pedestrians. It just has to hit less pedestrians than the average human driver.
Exactly. The current rate is 80 deaths per day in the US alone. Even if we had self-driving cars proven to be 10 times safer than human drivers, we’d still see 8 news articles a day about people dying because of them. Taking this as ‘proof’ that they’re not safe is setting an impossible standard and effectively advocating for 30,000 yearly deaths, as if it’s somehow better to be killed by a human than by a robot.
But they aren’t and likely never will be.
And how are we to correct for lack of safety then? With human drivers you obvious discourage dangerous driving through punishment. Who do you punish in a self driving car?
If you get killed by a robot, it simply lacks the human touch.
If you get killed by a robot, you can at least die knowing your death was the logical option and not a result of drunk driving, road rage, poor vehicle maintenance, panic, or any other of the dozens of ways humans are bad at decision-making.
Or the result of cost cutting…
It doesn’t even need to be logical, just statistically reasonable. You’re literally a statistic anytime you interact w/ any form of AI.
or a flipped comparison operator, or a “//TODO test code please remove”
“10 times safer than human drivers”, (except during specific visually difficult conditions which we knowingly can prevent but won’t because it’s 10 times safer than human drivers). In software, if we have replicable conditions that cause the program to fail, we fix those, even though the bug probably won’t kill anyone.
The problem with this way of thinking is that there are solutions to eliminate accidents even without eliminating self-driving cars. By dismissing the concern you are saying nothing more than it isn’t worth exploring the kinds of improvements that will save lives.
It needs to be way way better than ‘better than average’ if it’s ever going to be accepted by regulators and the public. Without better sensors I don’t believe it will ever make it. Waymo had the right idea here if you ask me.
But why is that the standard? Shouldn’t “equivalent to average” be the standard? Because if self-driving cars can be at least as safe as a human, they can be improved to be much safer, whereas humans won’t improve.
Humans absolutely improve.
I’d accept that if the makers of the self-driving cars can be tried for vehicular manslaughter the same way a human would be. Humans carry civil and criminal liability, and at the moment, the companies that produce these things only have nominal civil liability. If Musk can go to prison for his self-driving cars killing people the same way a regular driver would, I’d be willing to lower the standard.
Sure, but humans are only criminally liable if they fail the “reasonable person” standard (i.e. a “reasonable person” would have swerved out of the way, but you were distracted, therefore criminal negligence). So the court would need to prove that the makers of the self-driving system failed the “reasonable person” standard (i.e. a “reasonable person” would have done more testing in more scenarios before selling this product).
So yeah, I agree that we should make certain positions within companies criminally liable for criminal actions, including negligence.
I think the threshold for proving the “reasonable person” standard for companies should be extremely low. They are a complex organization that is supposed to have internal checks and reviews, so it should be very difficult for them to squirm out of liability. The C-suite should be first on the list for criminal liability so that they have a vested interest in ensuring that their products are actually safe.
Sure, the “reasonable person” would be a competitor who generally follows standard operating procedures. If they’re lagging behind the industry in safety or something, that’s evidence of criminal negligence.
And yes, the C-suite should absolutely be the first to look at, but the problem could very well come from someone in the middle trying to make their department look better than it is and lying to the C-suites. C-suites have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, whereas their reports don’t, so they can have very different motivations.
The average human driver is tried and held accountable
It does, actually. That’s why robotaxis and self-driving cars in general will never be a thing.
Society accepts that humans make mistakes, regardless of how careless they’re being at the time. Autonomous vehicles are not allowed the same latitude. A single pedestrian gets killed and we have to get them all off the road.
It’s bit reductive to put it in terms of a binary choice between an average human driver and full AI driver. I’d argue it has to hit less pedestrians than a human driver with the full suite of driver assists currently available to be viable.
Self-driving is purely a convenience factor for personal vehicles and purely an economic factor for taxis and other commercial use. If a human driver assisted by all of the sensing and AI tools available is the safest option, that should be the de facto standard.
That is the minimal outcomes for an automated safety feature to be an improvement over human drivers.
But if everyone else is using something you refused to that would have likely avoided someone’s death, while misnaming you feature to mislead customers, then you are in legal trouble.
When it comes to automation you need to be far better than humans because there will be a higher level of scrutiny. Kind of like how planes are massively safer than driving on average, but any incident where someone could have died gets a massive amount of attention.
